Lumentum and Cambridge Industries USA - with its holding company Cambridge Industries Group (CIG) - have entered into a strategic partnership which will see CIG acquire certain optical transceiver product lines from Lumentum and enter into a long-term strategic supply agreement for Lumentum’s photonic chips.

Walter Jankovic, Lumentum’s senior vice president and general manager, datacom commented: ‘I am pleased to partner with CIG and leverage our respective strengths to better address the market opportunity created by the highly anticipated growth in high-speed datacom and telecom client-side transceiver volumes driven by data centre expansion and 5G wireless over the coming years. This transaction enables Lumentum to become more commercially focused on its differentiated Indium Phosphide photonic chip capabilities and brings a new customer that is well positioned to compete in the datacom transceiver market.’

Added Gerald Wong, CIG’s president and CEO: ‘With this acquisition and ongoing partnership with Lumentum for supply of their industry leading photonic chips, together with CIG’s proven quality and volume JDM and ODM capabilities, CIG expands its capabilities with industry leading optical transceiver products and technology spanning the range of 10G, 25G to 400G serving many long-standing Tier 1 customers. We believe with the combination of CIG’s strengths in cost effective high volume manufacturing, and Lumentum’s optical transceiver team in Japan with their decades of experience in high performance datacom and telecom transmission, we are well positioned to address customer needs in the datacom and telecom client-side transceiver market.’

The transaction is expected to close in the second calendar quarter of 2019.

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